Xavier Llorà » innovation

ICEIS 2008: Final sprint and Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Xavier — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:10:46 +0000

This is the final sprint for ICEIS. I have been mostly focusing on posters this morning. It his hard to pick one up. I would just say that there was some interesting work on personalized recommender systems—paper 219. But as I said, there were a bunch of interesting ones and quite a few interesting by-the-poster conversations. Actually, I am having a very interesting time after the mix of attendees’ profiles.

The morning finally meandered into Ricardo Baeza-Yates‘s keynote talk. After the initial technical problems—presentation mode of OpenOffice running on Ubuntu 8.0.4 got up just 75% of the slide area—they finally succeeded on getting something up and get the talk started. This was a pretty technical talk about Yahoo! research effort on caching to improve the performance and also help scalability and contain cost on the coming years. Besides several cache techniques, he also presented a bunch of possible paralyzation models based on document/term partitions. A thing he breezed over was the machine learning model for classifying queries. That surfaced several places, from predicting common and rare content, to frequent, unfrequent, and rare queries. I was glad that the technical problems were solve and we could enjoy it.

And the conference is finally close. Next year, Milan.

ICEIS 2008: Saturday morning jam

Xavier — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:32:53 +0000

My morning jam involved papers 102, 363, 395, 450 709, 234, 392 and 499—that included a poster session too. There were some puzzling questions running around my head. Just one example out of paper 450; there are always many terminologies meaning the same and rewrite or revolve around the same problem: where is the difference between multicriteria optimization instead of multiobjective optimization. As I said, puzzling.

I also ran into a poster during the jam by Intel folks (paper 234) worth to mention. It was not proposing new technology but building on the creation of distributed data centers via virtualization technologies. They coined the term SVG’s to describe virtualization + data isolation + services providing. More on the level of exercise to show how people can move to virtual data centers hosted in the cloud, than on proposing new technology—they said they run VMWare for all the virtualization. The question still buzzes in my head unanswered: How is this new or different from Amazon’s EC2? The answer was that they focusses on the infrastructure not on hosting—which puzzled me more after claiming they rely on VMWare—I guess that I will need to dig deeper to get a better picture of their work.

Just getting close to the lunch break, paper 195 presented some work on an engineering approach to determine the emotional signature on clothing website. Built around the Kansei method, the paper resonate in my head very close to the Gladwell’s Blink book.

ICEIS 2008: Jorge Cardoso keynote speech

Xavier — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:55:04 +0000

Jorge Cardoso (SAP Research @ Dressden) presented their efforts on Thetsus/Texo. They are using the SOA paradigm as a way to reengineer business processes, pushing the good’old functional design decomposition to the next level. The building stone of their work is the ISE methodology that proposes to streamline as follows.

Innovation
Requirements
Design
Implementation
Preparation to market
Market lunch

The interesting twist of the methodology is that it also tries to treat each of these steps as services, raising again the buzz word of the conferences “business services”.